Why She Buys (19 page)

• Women dominate spending in virtually every consumer-products category.

• The person who makes a sales transaction isn’t necessarily the decision maker. Even if the woman of the house does not earn a paycheck, she likely determines the household’s expenditures.

• Women are raised in a different gender culture than men are, and their priorities and worldviews are different. The female culture should be studied with the same focus and intensity that entering a foreign market requires.

• Success for most global consumer-products companies lies in female hands.

Now that you’ve got an idea of where women are going, it’s time to look at companies that are already designing products to take them there.

4

PINK IS NOT

A STRATEGY

Creating Products with a Female Focus

I
n all that’s been written about the brilliance of Apple, one aspect of the company’s success has rarely been mentioned: that it just may be the world’s most discreetly feminine brand.

Take the iPod: it completely feminized the dude-driven world of stereo equipment. Small, beautiful, curvy, easy to use (no manual necessary), intuitive, and colorful, it’s everything that stereo equipment never was. The Shuffle version of the iPod is like the Volkswagen Beetle of the product line, and a magnet for women. The stereotype of the nerdy guy audiophile, with his mysterious knowledge of woofers, tweeters, and amps, has been replaced by women in workout gear running to their favorite songs on shiny teal Shuffles. Traditional stereo shops seem as out of date as the Victrola, and stand in contrast to Apple stores, which are
light, bright, and bursting with women. It’s hard to imagine that Nick Hornby could have written
High Fidelity
in the age of the iPod.

Slowly, women’s consumer dominance is transforming one industry after another. Consumer electronics is probably the most visible because of the abundance of pink phones and laptops, but even traditional industries such as household goods are being reshaped to their changing needs. (Witness the Swiffer, which we’ll cover in the pages ahead.) Women represent a massive opportunity for classically “male” industries to reach a new target audience and reinvigorate flat businesses. WD-40’s No Mess Pen, for example, has been created to enable people to carry around the lubricant—a mainstay of toolboxes—in purses and pockets. Much has been written about women’s shopping habits online and off, but their impact on the economy extends to product development itself. There is still an enormous opportunity to design products to better appeal to women.

Pink Is Not a Strategy

T
HERE
are two common mistakes people make when creating products intended for women. The first is to simply create pink versions of existing products, and the second is to try to market existing products to women without sufficiently adapting them to their needs.

Women are underrepresented in the fields of industrial design and engineering, so the feminine point of view is often absent in product development. Products that claim “macho” bragging rights to being bigger, faster, or stronger typically don’t impress women. When it comes to “unisex”
product categories, women want to know what something will do for them, how it will make their life better in some way, and how it will impact the people important to them; if it looks great, that’s all the better. There’s an old Shaker expression that captures the idea perfectly: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful, but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”

Does it need to be pink? No. Do women want a pink option sometimes? Sure. I love pink, and so do lots of women, but there are also millions who find it disappointing that the color of fairy princesses and Pepto-Bismol has somehow been designated the universal color for females. (Just try to buy a little girl a present that isn’t pink.) Women have a tempestuous relationship with the color. (See sidebar on
this page
.) And while it’s true that many pink versions of unisex products are successful, such as pink iPods and cell phones, they do well because women actually like their design and performance, not just the rosy hue.

When a product is offered in only one color, and that color is pink, it sends the message,
We haven’t put any thought into this at all
. A notable exception is when a product is raising money for breast cancer research, which, of course, is a wonderful cause. In fact, much of pink’s recent pervasiveness stems from such fund-raising, or from attempts to ride its coattails. But unless your company is trying to raise money for research into the disease, it’s best to consider pink as simply one color offering among many. Pink is style, not substance, and it doesn’t pass for a design strategy. Someday the current glut of pink products will be looked back on as the first stage of manufacturers’ response to the rising power of women.

The Lesson of Swiffer:
In the right hands, observing the obvious is golden

Myth:
Women will tell you everything you want.

Reality:
It’s better to watch what they do instead.

What do women want from your product?

The short answer is everything you’ve promised them. But getting to that point—actually determining what they need and want—is where the magic of good research comes in. And one of the most effective methods for studying women is observation, or what’s often called ethnographic research, the art of watching people in their natural habitat.

Procter & Gamble is a standout in this method of research. In 2005, the company’s CEO, A. G. Lafley, was the subject of a page-one feature story in the
Wall Street Journal
in which he declared that women were the heart of the company’s new turnaround strategy. A lot of people read the article and thought:
For heaven’s sake, if P&G doesn’t know how to market to women, who does?
After all, it’s the world’s largest consumer-products company and the world’s largest advertiser, and its customers are overwhelmingly women. But Lafley explained that even though women have been the company’s target consumers for more than 170 years, he felt the corporate culture had been too internally focused and hadn’t done enough to understand their needs.

P&G’s traditional formula was to create products in an R&D lab and then trot them out to the marketplace, promoting their technical and performance benefits. Lafley instituted a reverse process—finding out what women want through real-life observation in their homes, and then heading
back to the R&D labs to create the products. He also set a goal that half of all new products would come from outside the company. From 2002 to 2007, P&G invested $1 billion in consumer research, talking to more than four million customers each year.
¹
During the same period, its stock price soared, rising nearly two-thirds in value and setting new highs.

P&G employees will actually live with consumers in their homes and shop with them as they run their errands through an internal immersion program called Living It. Another program, called Working It, gives employees the opportunity to work behind the counter at small shops.
²
When it comes to consumer research, P&G goes deep.

Swiffer, Procter & Gamble’s mega cleaning brand and one of the great category disrupters, is a stunning example of the company’s ability to determine women’s unarticulated needs.

If you’re not familiar with Swiffer, it’s a line of cleaning products for mopping, sweeping, and dusting that has become a business and pop-culture phenomenon, appearing on everything from
Saturday Night Live
to the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine. Swiffer is the Mick Jagger of mops. P&G’s use of observational research played a significant role in the development of the product line, which is now in more than fifty million households.
³
Supported by a fun, pop-music-filled marketing campaign, Swiffer is well on its way to becoming one of P&G’s billion-dollar brands.

I interviewed one of the executives in charge of Swiffer, and the first thing you notice when talking to someone at Procter & Gamble is the unwavering use of the pronoun “she.” P&G is focused like a laser beam on women.

The idea for Swiffer came from detailed observations of
women mopping kitchen floors. Researchers from the company’s Mr. Clean team noticed that women spent serious amounts of time prepping their floors for mopping, as well as wringing out their dirty mops over and over again. They also learned just how much women hated touching a filthy, wet mop. If you’ve ever mopped, you know that when it’s time to squeeze the dirty water out of the mop head, or pour it out of the bucket, it’s almost impossible to avoid spilling it on yourself. Through its research, P&G also identified a trend it found intriguing: a rise in what the company calls the “ick” factor—the negative feelings around messy household chores.

“Cleaning was seen as drudgery, a thankless task, particularly for surface-cleaning areas,” says Kent Lynde, the executive who runs P&G’s surface-care business globally, of which Swiffer is the crown jewel. Mopping, in particular, was dreaded, and the negative feelings around it were getting worse. “We had to find out what that was all about,” explains Lynde.

There was a simple answer. P&G found that women’s increasing level of workforce participation (global trend #1) was driving a parallel increase in the “ick” factor, particularly around the mop-and-bucket process. “Women were thinking, ‘My lifestyle is now changing, and I don’t have time to deal with this bucket and water and all this mess and all these germs,” says Lynde.

There’s a certain brilliance in realizing that if P&G could find a solution to a universal problem—
mopping sucks
—everyone would love it.

F
INDING
G
OLD IN THE
M
UNDANE

By paying close attention to something so unpleasant that most of us would think it hardly worth a second thought, P&G went on to create one of its top-selling brands, which in the world’s largest consumer-products company is really saying something. The classic Swiffer (there are many variations now) is made with electrostatic sheets that can be tossed into the garbage after use. It’s essentially “bucket-less mopping”—no water, no squeezing, no sloshing. The process is odorless, clean, and easy. The word
Swiffer
is now a verb. And the brand is built on the lucrative razor-and-blades model of buying one handle and replenishing it with refills and pads. People hadn’t realized mopping could be done any other way—until P&G.

Swiffer’s success shows us how important it is to watch people interact with products in the context of their real lives—not just in corporate labs or R&D facilities. Many executives also rely too heavily on traditional feedback methods such as focus groups, in which participants may feel pressure to say what they think the moderator wants to hear, or conform to group opinion.

Lynde and his team consider observational research to be particularly valuable when it comes to new-to-the-world products. “Simulations are not that helpful to us. We have to know what’s really going on, and she can’t always say it. A survey can’t give you that,” he says. Originally, the Mr. Clean team had begun studying the “wet cleaning” process because that was the domain of its brand. By watching women, they started to learn about the “dry cleaning” process—the prep work that’s done before mopping the floor—and that’s what sparked the idea that led to Swiffer.

T
HE
C
ONSUMER
L
ED
U
S
T
HERE

“Originally, our insight into the category was all around wet cleaning,” Lynde explains. “P&G wasn’t in vacuum cleaners. We weren’t in brooms. But watching women prep for mopping was how we got the concept for our very first Swiffer product. We never had the intention of doing anything like that when we went into the research process. If we had a technology-led or product-led approach to R&D (as opposed to consumer-led), we never would have gotten there.”

I asked Lynde to name the one thing P&G never does in consumer research. His answer: “We never ask,
‘What kind of product would you like to have?’
We constantly learn that consumers don’t know a better life. They only know the current world.” It reminds me of that famous Henry Ford quote: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Almost all the traditional research methods are used at P&G, but many of its new-to-the-world ideas are hatched during in-home visits. “We’re always developing new products that have never existed before,” says Lynde. “So we use a lot of different research methods to get there. How we innovate is just as important as what we innovate.” Lynde notes that P&G can’t rely on in-home studies 100 percent of the time because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—or the Observer Effect—which means one’s observation of someone during an experiment can affect the experiment itself. It’s kind of like the difference between the first series of MTV’s
Real World
, which was genuinely fascinating, to the later ones, in which everyone is hamming for the camera.

Here’s a great example of the new-product pipeline that observational research can yield: Lynde and his team were
in a consumer’s home testing a Swiffer product one day when the woman told them that Swiffer was the first product she’d ever used that was light enough for her to lift up and reach the cobwebs in the corner of her ceiling. At that point, she lifted the product to the ceiling to show the researchers how she did it. That insight was the spark that led to the creation of the Swiffer Duster XL, which is elongated to help people reach those tricky ceiling corners.